House of Commons: No “Climategate”

A multiparty committee of Britain’s House of Commons has reported that climate researchers did not misrepresent data on global warming and that the scientist at the center of the “Climategate” controversy should be reinstated.

The Commons committee probed the leak of more than 1,000 e-mails, just before the Copenhagen climate conference. It found no evidence that the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia deliberately distorted data in establishing a link between human activities and the warming of the planet.

Still, the panel faulted Prof. Phil Jones, fellow scientists and the university for secrecy and what it called “the culture at CRU of resisting disclosure of information to climate change skeptics.”

“The focus on Professor Jones was misplaced,” Phil Willis, the committee chair, told a journalists’ briefing. “His actions were in line with common practices and those practices need to be changed.

“There is no evidence that Jones’ work has been undermined in any way . . . Jones has in many ways been scapegoated . . . people were asking him for information purely to undermind his research, but that was no excuse (not to release it).”

The leaked e-mails were trumpeted in the United States by Fox News, right-wing commentators Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, and other climate change skeptics.

Separately, a report issued Tuesday by Greenpeace says that a privately held American oil company – Koch Industries – has channeled more than $25 million to conservative groups and skeptics. It said the money has gone to such groups as Americans for Prosperity and the Cato Institute.

In leaked memos, Prof. Jones talked at one point of using a “trick” to “hide the decline” when talking about global temperatures — words seized upon by climate change critics.

But the parliamentary committee reported that these phrases were in reference to established scientific procedures and, as reported by The Independent, “there was no case to answer in terms of accusations of dishonesty on behalf of Professor Jones and his unit.”

The members of parliament stressed that at no point did the stolen e-mails, or in the resulting global controversy, produce any new evidence to challenge the growing scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”

At his briefing, as reported by the Associated Press, Willis argued that “Climategate” will ultimately build the argument for global warming by forcing the University of East Anglia to be more forthright in disclosing data.

“The winner in the end will be climate science itself,” he said.

Jones stepped down in December, pending the outcome of the inquiry. reinstated.